"Watson"
is one of the first prototypes of the system, that can perform QA task
(automatically answering a question posed in natural language by voice) really fast,
which is applicable to almost any industry from Health Care to
Aerospace.

The source of it's knowledge is coming from crawling a huge amount of
unstructured data including articles from Wikipedia, which is, with no
doubt, an example of crowd-sourced knowledge base and social software
service.

Taking into account the obvious business advantages,
which systems like Watson, can bring to enterprises by speeding up
decision making, market analysis, problems determination, etc., the
problem of creating knowledge base for the systems like it, becomes to
have really big priority.

All three things above, plus the
speed of technology evolution, brings me to an idea, that the need of
social software services in enterprises for collecting data becomes
continue to rise and will become huge competitive advantage in very near
future.

P.S.

To estimate the time
when answering human questions by machine will become something
ordinary, remember how much people can do with desktop computers 10 yeas
ago comparing to what they can do with modern smartphone + cloud
computing now.